The Democratic Divide - Yuppie Dean, Blue-Collar Gephardt

I like this analysis in TNR, if they had examined Clark I would like it more.

Dean, who learned fiscal conservatism from his investment-banker, Republican father, embodies today's Democratic Party better than Gephardt, the son of a Teamster from working-class St. Louis. Perhaps nothing explains the fight for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination better than that.

In appealing to unions and defending entitlements, Gephardt is pursuing roughly the same strategy that Mondale, Clinton, and Gore used to defeat outsider deficit-hawks. But that strategy is far harder now than it once was, because, over the years, the balance of power in the Democratic Party has been shifting: Dean supporters have been moving in, and Gephardt supporters have been moving out. Non-college-educated men have been drifting into the Republican Party. (In his final years as majority leader, Gephardt had to adjust the boundaries of his blue-collar St. Louis district because it was becoming too Republican.) Conversely, a 1998 National Journal study showed that the wealthiest 100 American communities, alienated by the GOP's fiscal irresponsibility and evangelical moralizing, were growing steadily more Democratic. This infusion of wealth into the Democratic Party means candidates with yuppie appeal can raise far more money than they could in the past. The last such candidate, Bradley, stunned political observers by raising almost as much money as Gore--a development that foreshadowed Dean's extraordinary fund-raising success this year.